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Digital / Humanities: New Media and Old Ways in South Korea

Javier ChaUniversity of Hong Kong

javierc@hku.hk

Abstract

This article outlines the background to the divide between ‘the digital’ and ‘the human-ities’ in contemporary South Korea. Since the late 1990s, the government of South Korea has made concerted efforts to digitize information, resulting in increased access to an unusually high quantity of heritage sources. However, the massive investments in the building of online resources have not inspired a ‘digital turn’ in the mainstream of South Korea’s departments in the humanities. This indifference to ‘the digital’, or what might be called a ‘digital/humanities divide’ has a history going back to the 1980s, when the Korean government and business leaders prepared for a post-industrial tran-sition without drawing the interest of humanists and without expecting the nation’s remarkable success in ict.

Keywords

south korea – ICT – digital humanities – cultural contents studies – planned economy

* The author wishes to express his gratitude to Florian Schneider, managing editor of Asiascape: Digital Asia, for his encouragement and meticulously reading through several drafts. Two anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments and suggestions that resulted in the considerable improvement of this article. This article also benefited a great deal from my interaction with Korean academics involved in humanities computing, digital humanities, or cultural contents studies during a trip to Seoul in July 2014. Our conversations provided me with the background information and important details for contextualizing government reports, newspaper articles, and data tables. For ethical reasons, their identity will remain anonymous.

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Introduction

The early twenty-first century is thought to be the beginnings of a digital age, an age of information abundance, or an age of ubiquitous computing. The digi-tal age has been named as such because of the growing centrality of devices capable of exchanging large sets of data packaged in long chains of zeroes and ones. In addition to Bill Gates’ vision of a personal computer in every home becoming a reality in many parts of the world, advances in information and communications technology (ict) have contributed to the decline of Fordism, the rise of a sharing economy, the birth of the new media industry, and so on. Along with innovations in low-power microprocessors, intelligent power grids, and additive manufacturing, digital technology is of vital importance in theo-ries that predict the coming of what is variably called the post-industrial soci-ety (Bell 1973), the Third Wave (Toffler 1980), or the Third Industrial Revolution (Rifkin 2011).

In parts of academia, these changes in the technology sector have provided the impetus for a ‘digital turn’ or ‘computational turn’ in the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities. One should note, though, that the use of computers in academic research is not a new phenomenon. The digital turn in the humanities or ‘digital humanities’ originates from a cross-disciplinary venture known as ‘humanities computing’ (McCarty 2003; Hockey 2004). To mention a few examples from historical studies, American historians in econometrics computationally processed historical statistical data as early as the 1960s and 1970s. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, of the Annales tradition, acknowledged the technological advantage that his American counterparts had enjoyed. He challenged his fellow French historians to incorporate the computer as a tool for historical research, particularly in crunching time-series data collected by practitioners of l’histoire sérielle (Le Roy Ladurie 1979). In the 1980s and 1990s, the proliferation of personal computers elicited a great deal of interest in humanities computing. The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia (1992-2007), George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (1994-), and the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative in Berkeley, California (1997-) were established in this context.

Early proponents of humanities computing included scholars of East Asia. Edward Wagner (1924-2001), a professor of Korean history at Harvard University, pioneered humanities computing in the field. In the 1970s, Wagner began to compile a comprehensive database of 14,600 civil service examina-tion degree holders in early modern Korea using a punch-card system tweaked to handle East Asian characters. Robert Hartwell (1932-1996) laid the ground-work for a massive prosopographical database of China’s historical figures.

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The China Biographical Database project, currently housed at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, is an extensively reworked version of Hartwell’s original database and has since added hundreds of thou-sands of additional records. In South Korea, Kim Hyŏn, a professor of humani-ties informatics at the Academy of Korean Studies, famously released in 1995 a digitally-reworked cd-rom edition of The Annals of the Chosŏn Dynasty (Chosŏn wangjo sillok 朝鮮王朝實錄), a daily chronicle of the early modern Korean court, with a robust interface capable of full-text search.

The moniker ‘digital humanities’ was coined in the 2000s in response to widespread internet access, the rise of social media, and the infiltration of portable electronic devices including laptop computers, smartphones, and tablets into the classroom (Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth 2004). To a large degree, digital humanities continued to build on previous experiments in humanities computing, including the digitization of sources, statistical analy-sis of large data sets, and electronic texts. On the other hand, archives moved from cd-rom to the Web, the nature of online content changed from mostly static pages to dynamically-generated and user-interactive content, and access to information became ubiquitous and very inexpensive. Rather unexpectedly, digital humanities gained currency in the years following the subprime mort-gage crash of 2008, which created a sense of crisis among graduate students and junior and adjunct faculty (Borgman 2009). Thus, the digital humanities movement in the United States is concerned with proposing alternatives to the conventions of research, teaching, and professional development in higher education, drawing inspiration from some of the countercultural aspects of the Silicon Valley.

This special issue of Asiascape presents a set of articles written in response to the question: ‘Where is Digital Asia?’ Broadly, ‘the digital’ refers to ways that the building and uses of ict infrastructure has influenced East Asian societies, and the specific roles of ‘the digital’ have changed tremendously over the past few decades. Of many possible areas of research, including politics, censor-ship, gaming culture, automation of labour, and so on, this article explores the relationship between ‘the digital’ and an issue that should strike close to home for academic readers: scholarly engagement.

At present, the aims and functions of Area Studies need to be reimagined and reinvented in and for the technological environment of Web 2.0 and sub-sequent stages of the digital revolution. While critiques of Orientalism, indus-trial development, and Cold War politics and culture remain important, the field of East Asian studies might consider paying closer attention to issues that speak to recent developments in the region. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Asia is closely associated with advances in ict. In the early

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twenty-first century, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea boast some of the fastest broadband networks in the world. Taiwan has secured a solid repu-tation as a leading producer of electronics components and circuitry. Japanese, Chinese, South Korean, and Taiwanese companies regularly feature on lists of most valuable global brands in consumer electronics and personal and mobile computers, most of which are manufactured and assembled in mainland China. What are the implications of these contemporary, post-industrial devel-opments for scholars of East Asia? The digital turn in East Asian studies entails more than simply the use of computational methods in research and teach-ing, and should provide constructive, creative, and critical perspectives on the transformation of many East Asian societies from a low-wage, labour-intensive to an advanced manufacturing, service-oriented, and knowledge-based econ-omy. This transition, however, may not prove to be a smooth one as this article demonstrates through the case of South Korea.

Owing to the extraordinary success in ict, South Korea stands out for its concerted push for the digital transformation of society, more so than its neighbours in East Asia. In the early twenty-first century, ‘the digital’ (tijit’ŏl 디지털) has become paramount to South Korea’s collective self-identity and national branding. To ensure the country’s long-term success in a hypercon-nected and hypercompetitive world economy, the government of South Korea launched a series of initiatives to reinvent the humanities, which is expected to promote social harmony and national unity as well as provide the background training and materials related to Korea’s cultural heritage. The former is an extension of a position that goes back at least to the 1960s. The latter concerns the use of heritage materials to produce marketable digital contents ‒ or, for short, ‘contents’ (k’ont’ench’ŭ 콘텐츠) ‒ such as television drama, film, and videogames. To fulfil this vision, the government has aggressively pushed for the digitization of cultural heritage, including historical texts, visual materi-als, three-dimensional scans of objects and sites, and audiovisual recordings of intangible culture. Many online resources that academics in Korean studies regularly use are products of the government’s particular understanding of the role that the humanities should play in the new century. However, the stagger-ing amount of resources poured into these massive digitization projects did not inspire a ‘digital turn’ in mainstream departments in the humanities.

This article outlines the background to what I refer to as the divide between ‘the digital’ and ‘the humanities’ in contemporary South Korea. Until the late 1990s, South Korea, as an inexperienced player in technology-related sectors, anticipated the coming of a new type of technology-driven, knowledge-based economy but did not expect the current level of success. A handful of early pioneers in the humanities digitized historical sources using punch cards or

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cd-rom. However, there has been no substantial research about electronic texts, digital media, or computational methods in the humanities, and there are no Korean research centres equivalent to the Electronic Text Center, Center for History and New Media, or the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative. Moreover, unlike the history of humanities computing and digital humanities in the United States, the global effects of America’s subprime mortgage collapse in 2008 hardly played a role. Instead, paramount to the Korean case was the 1997 Asian financial crisis. In 1997 and 1998, two government stimulus packages provided the initial funds for building a collection of online resources called ‘National dbs’ (Kukka tibi 국가 DB), the majority of which contains materials that would concern humanists but that were not created to reflect the con-cerns of humanists. Digital archives such as National dbs were created under government directive, rather than to fulfil the demands of grassroots human-ists. This pattern persists to this day. In summer 2014, the National Research Foundation of Korea (Han’guk yŏn’gu chaedan 한국연구재단) awarded a bk21 (‘Brain Korea 21’) fund to the Association for Humanities Contents Studies (Inmun k’ont’ench’ŭ hakhoe 인문콘텐츠학회) for a project that aims to ‘bridge’ the divide between ‘cultural contents’ (munhwa k’ont’ench’ŭ 문화콘텐츠) ‒ the use of digitized heritage resources for use in the new media industry ‒ and ‘the humanities’ in the strictly academic sense. The initiative to ‘bridge’ these two independent trajectories will need to consider the legacy of factors that contributed to the digital transformation of South Korea and why humanists have been largely uninvolved in this process.

ict in South Korea: An Unexpected Success

South Korea is a frontrunner in ict. Samsung and lg, two of the most rec-ognized brands in consumer electronics, fulfilled one third of the world’s demand for flat-panel televisions and accounted for forty per cent of mobile phones sold within Korea and abroad in 2010. From New York’s Times Square to Nanjing Road in Shanghai and the Corniche in Abu Dhabi, billboards of Korean laptops, smartphones, and tablets have become a common sight. At home, Koreans have built an ultra-wired society that received the highest ict Development Index rating between 2008 and 2012.1 A dense network of

1  The International Telecommunication Union (itu), a specialized agency in the United Nations, assesses each member nation’s state of telecommunications using a set of metrics. itu regu-larly publishes the ict Development Index (idi) based on indicators designed to capture: (1) access to ict hardware such as telephone, computer, and the internet; (2) subscription

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telephone, cable, optical fibre lines, and cellular towers offer some of the fast-est data connections available in a society where 95 to 97 per cent of house-holds are online (oecd 2014: 165).2 Beyond infrastructure, ict has infiltrated public administration and everyday culture. The government of South Korea has consistently topped the chart of the United Nations’ e-government devel-opment index between 2010 and 2014 (un 2010: 114; un 2012: 11; un 2014: 15). Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (dmb), a technology for wirelessly broadcast-ing digital contents, has a regular viewership of 27 million in a country with a population of 50 million (O’Brien 2010). Particularly popular among commut-ers, many eyes on subways in Seoul are glued to smartphone screens playing dmb-streamed television programmes. And then there is gaming culture. No description of digital culture in South Korea would be complete without men-tion of pc-bang (a type of internet cafe) and Ongamenet (a television channel dedicated to broadcasting videogames-related content, mostly the StarCraft series and League of Legends; Jin 2010). South Korea is the birthplace of popular franchises such as Ragnarok, MapleStory, and Lineage, and is home to 25 mil-lion active gamers, which include a large number of ‘addicts’ who need treat-ment as well as professional competitors who dream of having their gameplay shown on television (Oh & Larson 2011: 3798).

To the extent that ict in Korea wins praises, it is also a source of frustration for many users and hopeful observers. South Korean websites are notoriously unaccommodating of non-conformists. Making a simple online transaction or signing up for a WiFi hotspot is not possible without undergoing a confus-ing procedure of identification verification, many of which recognize only Korean government-issued documents. As for online shopping, this is out of reach to most non-pc and non-Internet Explorer users, regardless of their Korean or non-Korean residency. The most widespread authentication system in the country relies on code packaged in ActiveX, an outdated framework that requires both Windows and Internet Explorer. Another common criti-cism concerns ict’s failed restructuring of the economy. The future-oriented,

to services; and (3) ict skills. South Korea has been a top performer in this rating system. In 2012, the most recent available figure, South Korea ranked the highest with a score of 8.57, followed by Nordic countries: Sweden (8.45), Iceland (8.36), and Denmark (8.35). South Korea topped the idi chart in 2011 (8.56), 2010 (8.40), and 2008 (7.80). See itu (2013: 24, 2012: 21, and 2011:13).

2  For the year 2012, the official oecd figure for ‘percentage of households with access to the internet’ in South Korea was 97.3%. To put this in perspective, the equivalent figure for the Netherlands was 93.6%, while the United Kingdom scored 86.8%, the United States 71.7%, and Canada 80.5%. The official itu estimate for South Korea, stated in itu (2011: 11), is 95%.

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techno-utopian vision of ‘ubiquitous Korea’ has become an emblem for South Korea’s spectacular bounce-back from the 1997 Asian financial crisis and eco-nomic resilience in subsequent years. Since the late 1990s, however, the coun-try has only increased its economy’s dependence on large conglomerates, and ict-oriented economic growth has not decreased the disproportionately high rate of poverty among people above 65 years of age. Samsung currently makes up a staggering twenty per cent of South Korea’s gdp, and a labour market that increasingly demands highly specialized skills has alienated the elderly, who in 2010 constituted ten per cent of the total work force (The Economist 2011). While ict did not cause these structural shortcomings, South Korea is far from a technological utopia. Disruptive innovations such as additive manufacturing and automation will only make matters worse in this rapidly ageing society. The ratio between people above the mandatory retirement age and working-age adults is projected to become seven to one by 2050 (ibid.).

Numbers and rankings may not tell the whole story but they are useful for identifying trends and aspirations. South Korea’s consistently high rating in ict-related indices owes to a long and deliberate process. These impressive figures are indicative of the government’s pledge to transform the nation into a competitive leader in one of the most important and fastest-growing sectors in the modern economy. Between 1998 and 2013, South Korea’s gdp tripled from $376 billion to $1.3 trillion us dollars, and ict is estimated to have con-tributed about thirty to forty per cent of growth in 2011 (Yonhap News Agency 2012). Accordingly, Korea has become an aggressive investor in ict-related R&D, which constituted 53 per cent of all R&D investments in 2012 (Baik 2011). Government subsidies and tax incentives have been driving the growth of pat-ent production and business R&D in ict and other stem fields. In 2013, South Korea spent 4.4 per cent of gdp in R&D, the highest figure among oecd mem-bers, and the intention to further raise the bar is clear (Quartz 2014).

ict in South Korea developed with the consistent involvement of the gov-ernment and large conglomerates. Many Korean ict companies operate as an electronics division within their multi-industry parent company. In this regard, Korea’s ict industry stands in contrast to the startup culture of Silicon Valley. This entire process has followed the old way of central economic planning. With that said, success in this new sector was anything but guaranteed. South Korea’s rise to the top of the ict world may be thought of as another coming of the so-called Miracle on the Han River. R&D investments in the 1980s prepared South Korea for the post-industrial transition, but a positive end result was an unlikely outcome given the initial conditions. Yet by 2003, the itu rated Korea as ‘the leading example of a country rising from a low level of ict access to one of the highest in the world’ (itu 2003: 1).

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Internet services for consumers in Korea began in June 1994 with thirty sub-scribers. Korea Internet, the service provider, was pleased with the addition of 580 new users over the subsequent five months (Kim Sŭnghwan 1996: 11). The total number of internet users in South Korea steadily grew to about ten per cent of the population in 1998, but the infrastructure lagged behind. For instance, South Korea did not have its own, independent Internet Exchange Point (ixp) in July 1996, meaning that domestic internet traffic had to initially travel across the Pacific to a us server and back (Tonga Ilbo 1996). A consor-tium of Internet Service Providers launched a commercial ixp for the first time in December 1996, and a more robust ixp called Korea Internet Neutral Exchange (kinx) in June 1999.

ict took off shortly after the Asian financial crisis in 1997. The total number of internet subscribers in South Korea grew exponentially from 365,000 in 1995 to 731,000 in 1996, 1,634,000 in 1997, and 3,103,000 in 1998, and it surpassed the

5 million mark in 1999 (Hankyoreh 1999). Broadband subscribers likewise soared from 13,000 in 1998 to 365,000 in 1999, 4,017,000 in 2000, and 7,805,000 in 2001 (Yŏnhap Nyusŭ 2002). Subsequently, this figure jumped to fifty per cent of the population in 2001 and the current official figure stands at 97 per cent. While the late 1990s was a time when many societies around the world expe-rienced a rapid increase in the number of internet subscribers, an itu report shows that South Korea’s growth rate was higher than not only the global average but also that of advanced economies (itu 2003: 1). Under pressure to recover the economy, the government pledged to transform South Korea into ‘a digital power’ (tijit’ŏl kangguk 디지털강국) under initiatives variably called ‘CyberKorea 21’ in 1999, ‘e-Korea Vision 2006’ in 2002, and ‘ubiquitous Korea’ subsequently. To create a solid consumer base in the domestic market, the Ministry of Information and Communication launched a project to create a new national subjectivity with an ict twist. The initiative for ‘Internet Education for 10 Million Citizens’ provided technology education between 2000 and 2002 and was extended for another five years under the oversight of fourteen gov-ernment agencies (Oh & Larson 2011: 2377). The scale of government-directed technology education drastically changed before and after the Asian financial crisis. During the ten years between 1988 and 1998, a programme for provid-ing computer education to rural communities trained a total 73,548 citizens (Yŏnhap Nyusŭ 1998). In contrast, the Internet Education campaign targeted 10 million citizens in just two years. This digital citizen-making had an uncanny resemblance to the idea of ‘remoulding the Korean people’ (minjok kaejo 民族改造) during the creation of a capitalist market economy in the 1960s, though, unlike the time of rapid industrialization, humanists were uninvolved in this transformative process.

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ict and the Humanities

The story of the digital/humanities divide in South Korea begins in the period of rapid industrialization. In 1960, South Korea’s economy was predominantly agrarian, with about sixty per cent of the population living outside of urban areas (Yun 2014: 415). To transform South Korea into an industrial economy, a nationwide capitalist market had to be created through a new subjectiv-ity (Yun 2014: 415-26). Humanists responded to the ongoing situation with ‘internal development theory’ (naejae chŏk palchŏllon 內在的發展論), a Korean brand of modernization theory based on W.W. Rostow’s (1960) anti-communist model of economic growth in stages. Pioneers of internal develop-ment theory, consisting mostly of historians and literary scholars, sought to unearth ‘the impetus for progress’ (palchŏn ŭi wŏndongyŏk 發展의 原動力) through positivist, contextualized readings of historical sources (Yi 1977: 11). The result was a set of integrated accounts of Korea’s economic, sociopoliti-cal, intellectual, and literary history that illustrated an indigenous path toward modernization ‒ literally, Korea’s ‘internal development’ free of foreign influ-ence and intervention. This generation of humanists showed a deep concern for the contemporary relevance of history and formed intellectual circles to discuss these issues. Their collective search to discover ‘the impetus of prog-ress’ from Korea’s past went hand in hand with the ongoing discussions regard-ing the urgent need to ‘remould the Korean people’ with a liberal-capitalist economic subjectivity. Internal development theory provided a powerful way of legitimating capitalism as an outcome of Korea’s endemic development through the claim that precursors of it could be rediscovered from tradition.

In the early 1980s, South Korea’s government and business leaders needed a new economic model. Three major waves of government-directed economic development projects in the 1960s and 1970s guided the blistering growth of targeted areas such as heavy and chemical industry and low-wage, labour-intensive manufacturing. As economic growth began to peter out, govern-ment officials and social scientists prepared a new developmental model after Fordism. Particularly popular at this time were Daniel Bell and Alvin Toffler, who on several occasions were invited to give high-profile lectures and advise policymakers.3 The priority was to move away from low-wage manufactur-ing and prepare for the coming of what Bell termed ‘post-industrial society’

3  On 9 July 1990, Daniel Bell gave a public lecture about information society and South Korea’s future role in the Asia-Pacific region. Korea Telecom organized this event, which also marked his first visit to the country. See Maeil Kyŏngje Sinmun (1990: 15); Tonga Ilbo (8 July 1990: 15); Tonga Ilbo (9 July 1990: 16); Hankyoreh (1990: 8).

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based on a service-oriented and information-driven economy. The challenge was that South Korea at this time lagged behind in technology-related sec-tors, which had been left out of the selective development strategy during the period of industrialization. Telephone and television networks and the semi-conductor industry were all seriously underdeveloped. In 1980, only 2.8 million residential telephone lines served a population of 36 million, and the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications had a backlog of 600,000 households that on average waited for eighteen months for service installation (undp 1999: 20-1; Oh & Larson 2011: 916). Colour television broadcasting, which was available in more than one hundred nations, began only in October 1980 (Oh & Larson 2011: 23, 454, 559). Eventually, public and private enterprises invested in ict R&D and expanded their business in semiconductors, consumer electronics, and telecommunications. This trend would continue into the 1990s and eventu-ally lead to the success of Samsung, lg, sk Hynix, Korea Telecom, and others, despite the odds stacked against them in a competitive industry.

Despite its unexpected success ‒ or perhaps because of it ‒ ict development did not bring about an epistemic shift in the humanities. The digital/humani-ties divide in South Korea may be explained as a product of the humanists’ deep involvement in South Korea’s nation-building and rapid industrializa-tion in the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent disengagement from the technol-ogy- and service-oriented economic development that followed starting in the 1980s. By this time, internal development theory reached maturity with the accumulation of a critical mass of empirical research. Leading contributors shifted their attention from industrialization to democratization and pursued extensions of the paradigm, such as history from below, Confucian critiques of capitalism, and early modern literature and culture. Meanwhile, government officials and business leaders pondered issues such as the post-industrial turn, futurism, and techno-utopianism with almost no input from humanists. Daniel Bell and Alvin Toffler are familiar names to many South Korean academics in the social sciences and the humanities. However, keyword searches on kiss and DBpia, two of the largest online repositories of scholarly journals, tell a different story. Only three articles matched ‘Daniel Bell’ (Taniel Pel 다니엘벨) in the title, author, or abstract fields ‒ two articles published in 1990 and one in 2014. Similarly, six articles matched the keyword ‘Toffler’ (T’op’ŭllŏ 토플러) in Alvin Toffler ‒ four articles published in the 1990s, one published in 2008, one Korean translation of Toffler’s thoughts about the future of Korea, and several irrelevant or non-academic entries.

Regardless, South Korea boasts an impressive repository of digitized heri-tage materials. The sheer amount of digitized materials already available at a

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Korea specialist’s disposal is mind-boggling. A government report from 2010 claims: ‘though our country’s hardware side of it is decent, the accumula-tion and usage of knowledge contents may be said to be caught in a low level’ (Inmun Sahoe Haksul Chinhŭng Changgi Pijŏn Surip Ch’ujin Wiwŏnhoe 2010: 213). Perhaps this statement is a rhetorical way of justifying the continued sup-port for the digitization of information, including the building of National dbs, or perhaps the government official who drafted this report truly believed this. Whatever the case, numerous databases of digitized records, featuring both primary and secondary sources as well as materials in textual and multimedia formats, have been made available for academic and public use under govern-ment and private initiatives. As of July 2014, kiss has digitized 1,778 journals and 1.3 million articles, DBpia 1,942 journals, 1.77 million articles, and 14,800 electronic books, and riss 3.6 million articles from domestic journals, 42.8 mil-lion articles from overseas journals, and 1.14 million theses and dissertations. The push for the digitization of heritage shows no signs of slowdown. The National db collection alone contains ninety independent databases, of which 71 would be of primary concern to humanists and social scientists. Since 1999, the Ministry of Science, ict, and Future Planning (in its previous incarnations; hereafter referred to as the Ministry of Future Planning) spent krw öW750 bil-lion (approximately usd $720 million) on the building of National dbs. Yet, the Korean government is only getting started. In April 2014, the Ministry of Future Planning announced a plan to move beyond textual sources to 3D scans and virtual reality reconstructions of heritage sites such as Sŏkkuram Grotto near the ancient capital of Kyŏngju (The Financial News 2014). The Ministry of Future Planning approved a seed fund in the region of krw öW2 billion (usd $1.92 million) to build two or three 3D databases during the pilot run (ibid.).

What prompted the aggressive building of these databases? To a degree, early pioneers played a part. Online resources could not be built without the input of experts with the necessary technical knowledge and experience. Edward Wagner was not interested in promoting humanities computing in Korean studies. He wished to analyze, computationally, specific sets of data pertain-ing to meritocracy and social mobility in early modern Korea. Nonetheless, he inspired Kim Hyŏn, who, contrary to Wagner, played a more active role. Kim was originally trained in Korean Neo-Confucian philosophy and attained a PhD degree in this subject at Korea University in 1992. Between 1985 and 2004, Kim took part in projects that dealt with multimedia publishing, the Korean subset of the Unicode, gis, and database design, during which time he also worked on the first-ever digital edition of The Annals of the Chosŏn Dynasty. In 2005, Kim Hyŏn mediated the transfer of rights of the cd-rom edition to the

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National Institute of Korean History. The current online edition of The Annals of the Chosŏn Dynasty is an enhanced version of Kim’s 1995 cd-rom release.4 The Korean government was not involved in either project. Wagner received his research funds from the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and Kim developed his cd-rom while he served as Chief Technology Officer of a company called Seoul System Corporation. In addition to The Annals of the Chosŏn Dynasty, Kim’s involvement in various other digitization projects as a chair, manager, technician, or consultant deserves to be a subject of in-depth research.

Like ict, the 1997 Asian financial crisis marked a turning point toward large-scale digitization of cultural heritage under government directive. National dbs, for example, launched with the funds allocated for the Informatization Labour Project (Chŏngbohwa kŭllo saŏp 정보화근로사업), so named because this project originally provided a stimulus package for creating blue-collar jobs at a time of economic hardship. However, workers who experienced layoffs during the Asian financial crisis were mainly of the white-collar kind, and they were not keen on menial jobs in construction projects modeled after the New Deal in the 1930s United States. In 1998, a massive fund worth krw öW1.35 tril-lion (usd $108 million) was passed on to the Ministry of Communication and Technology (a previous incarnation of Ministry of Future Planning) to create 24,000 white-collar jobs involving the digitization of information ‒ broadly defined (Yŏnhap Nyusŭ 1998). A sizeable portion of the Informatization Labour Project fund ended up in four major public institutions that handled heritage sources: the Kyujanggak Institute at Seoul National University, the Academy of Korean Studies, the National Institute of Korean History, and the Institute for the Translation of Korean Classics. This motion led to the official birth of National db, a multiyear project that has been funded by the National Information Society Agency (Han’guk Chŏngbohwa Chinhŭngwŏn 한국정보화진흥원) since 1999.

The annual budget allocated for National dbs has varied between a low of krw öW16.5 and a high of $16.5 and $66.4 million (approximately usd $15.8 and 63.7 million, respectively) between 1999 and 2013 (Table 1). To provide perspec-tive, this amount is equivalent to three to fourteen times the annual operat-ing budget of the Office of the Digital Humanities at the National Endowment of the Humanities in the United States, which in 2015 is approved to receive 4.4 million dollars in federal funds (National Information Society Agency 2014; neh 2014: 69). A National db project usually lasts for one to two or three years and hires hundreds of academics and contractors. One project leader I met

4  See http://db.itkc.or.kr/itkcdb/text/joIntroducPopup.jsp for information in Korean (retrieved 29 October 2014).

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informally remarked over dinner that he felt like a ceo of a medium-sized company. He was half serious. Each project typically receives hundreds of million krw in annual funding. A two-year National db project for which a breakdown of budget is publicly available, An Online System of the Honam Region’s Record-Keeping Culture (Honam kirok munhwa sisŭt’em 호남기록문화시스템), operated on an annual budget of krw öW630 million in 2006 and krw öW500 million in 2007 (Honam Kirok Munhwa Sisŭt’em 2007: 2). Ten per cent of this money was spent on software development, ten per cent on hardware, and eighty per cent on ‘database building’ defined broadly, probably referring to labour and expert input (Honam Kirok Munhwa Sisŭt’em 2007:2). Five hun-dred people, including many junior and senior academics and graduate stu-dents in the humanities, contributed their labour and expert knowledge to An Online System of the Honam Region’s Record-Keeping Culture (Honam Kirok Munhwa Sisŭt’em 2007:2). Despite their long involvement in digitization proj-ects as domain experts, humanists generally do not seem to see the bearing of building such large-scale online resources on research and teaching. Once the funding period ended, the project team dispersed and returned to their pursuit of familiar topics using established methods.5

As for the function of these archives, a discrepancy exists between how aca-demics use them and what they are intended to produce out of this massive data. On the one hand, digital archives have significantly changed the way that research is conducted in Korean studies. A modern researcher of nineteenth-century Korea no longer rummages through pages of a printed edition of The Annals of the Chosŏn Dynasty. She likely prefers to access the online edition, which allows browsing by date or subject, full-text search, and instant lookup of proper names and special terms.6 And to supplement this court-centred and textual record, an array of other online databases is at her disposal: for

5  From Kim Hyŏn 2012:601 and National Information Society Agency http://www.nia.or.kr/Contents/06_public/mainbusiness.asp?BoardID=201112131559429988&order=070400 (retrieved 29 October 2014).

6  The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty. http://sillok.history.go.kr (retrieved 29 October 2014).

table 1 Annual Budget Allocated for National dbs (in billion krw).5

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

50 34.2 32.8 27.5 47 47 66.4 43 27 16.5 58.4 34.6 28 15 14.7

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example, the statistical data available at kosis, local-level sources in A Com-pendium of Sources for Local History of Korea (Han’guk chibangsa charyo ch’ongsŏ 한국지방사자료총서), and visual materials available in the National Museum of Korea’s collection of high-resolution images.7 The same goes for scholarly surveys. Chances are, she accesses the Korean-language scholarship on her topic by querying these three databases: riss, kiss, and DBpia.8 She still would need to leaf through some printed volumes to obtain articles on the off chance that they are not available in digital form and because the majority of book-length monographs in Korean studies are still published in print-only format.

However, this is not the only intended use of online resources from the Korean government’s standpoint. National dbs also target the non-academic Korean public and the creation of digital contents for domestic and global consumption. A government report from 2010 titled ‘A Long-Term Vision for Promoting Research to Build a Humanistic Society by 2030’ (2030 inmun sahoe haksul chinhŭng changgi pijŏn 2030 인문사회 학술진흥 장기비전) illus-trates this point. According to this report, ‘digital humanities’ does not entail new dilemmas posed by the digital age, new types of inquiry made possible by digitized sources, or new research methods enabled by computational process-ing. The digital humanities are seen as synonymous with academic research that promotes the growth of economic activities involving commodified uses of cultural heritage (Inmun Sahoe Haksul Chinhŭng Changgi Pijŏn Surip Ch’ujin Wiwŏnhoe 2010:216-7). The Korean expression for this is ‘cultural con-tents studies’ (munhwa k’ont’ench’ŭ hak 문화콘텐츠학), which serves as the academic wing of the Park Geun-hye administration’s oft-repeated pledge to transform South Korea into a ‘creative economy’ (ch’anjo kyŏngje 창조경제). According to the report ‘the digitization of sources pertaining to the humani-ties and the social sciences lays the foundation for [the production of] creative knowledge contents’ (Inmun Sahoe Haksul Chinhŭng Changgi Pijŏn Surip Ch’ujin Wiwŏnhoe 2010:213). This strategy targets three areas. One goal is to

7  Korean Statistics Information System, http://kosis.kr (retrieved 29 October 2014). Han’guk kojŏn chonghap tibi, http://db.itkc.or.kr/ (retrieved 29 October 2014). Han’guk chibangsa charyo ch’ongsŏ, http://www.krpia.co.kr/pcontent/?svcid=kr&proid=51

(retrieved 29 October 2014). Kungnip chungang pangmulgwan, http://www.museum.go.kr/ (retrieved 29 October 2014).8  Research Information Sharing Service for Higher Education. http://www.riss.kr/ (retrieved 29

October 2014). Koreanstudies Information Service System. http://kiss.kstudy.com/ (retrieved 29 October

2014). DBpia. http://www.dbpia.co.kr/ (retrieved 29 October 2014).

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have an economic impact beyond the confines of academic research, such as the role that the online edition of The Annals of the Chosŏn Dynasty played in the creation of popular Korean historical dramas Dae Jang Geum and Yi San. Another hope is to promote synergy between Korea’s advanced it hardware and R&D and the creative capacity thought to be intrinsic to the humanities. The last part discusses the place of cultural heritage in twenty-first century South Korea’s knowledge economy. The report cites figures provided by pwc, a consulting firm, to estimate that the cultural contents industry constitutes a usd $2 trillion market worldwide and a usd $500 billion market in Asia (Table 2). The several trillion Won that the government of South Korea spent since the late 1990s on the digitization of cultural heritage, including many National dbs, is part of a grand strategy to place the country in an advantageous posi-tion in an enormous, and ever-growing, global new media industry.

In the early twenty-first century, the South Korean government and busi-nesses are keen to sustain the old ways of export-oriented growth. Unlike the previous century, however, the types of commodity are no longer limited to manufactured goods. Products packaged in digital media, such as film, drama, software, and videogames, entered the picture, and new technologies are also offered for sale in the form of equipment, consulting, training, and loyalty for patents. In the midst of these developments, the rise of the Korean Wave proved particularly valuable for marketing and branding purposes. The vari-ous efforts to extend the life and influence of the Korean Wave have a more far-reaching significance than simply expression of national pride. The Korean Wave sells a positive image about South Korea in important markets such as mainland China, Hong Kong, and various parts of Southeast Asia, which pro-vides a competitive edge for South Korean goods, productions, and techno-logical innovations sold overseas (The Korea Herald 2010; Inmun Sahoe Haksul Chinhŭng Changgi Pijŏn Surip Ch’ujin Wiwŏnhoe 2010: 310-1).9

9  From Inmun Sahoe Haksul Chinhŭng Changgi Pijŏn Surip Ch’ujin Wiwŏnhoe 2010: 219.

table 2 The Scale of the Cultural Contents Industry: Asia and the World (in billion us dollars).9

Market 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

World 1,703 1,803 1,936 2,053 2,198Asia 370 398 434 469 508

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On the range of implications related to South Korea in this new situation, humanists generally maintain a dismissive attitude. A keyword search of ‘digi-tal’ (tijit’ŏl 디지털) and ‘humanities’ (inmunhak 인문학) on kiss, DBpia, and riss returns just over 100 results. In addition to irrelevant and non-academic entries, most of those articles deal with digital media and cultural contents. Only four articles directly concern the digital turn in the humanities: Ch’oe Hŭisu (2011), Han Tonghyŏn (2013), Kim Hyŏn (2013), and Kim Paro (2014). Ch’oe Hŭisu’s article was not accessible at the time of writing because of a technical glitch on the part of riss. Both Han Tonghyŏn and Kim Hyŏn inde-pendently share their strategies for bringing humanistic inquiries into the field of cultural contents. Lastly, Kim Paro offers a survey of major digital humani-ties projects in overseas institutions.

On 3 July 2014, the Association for Humanities Contents Studies hosted the inaugural meeting of a seminar series called ‘Cultural Contents Forum’ (Munhwa k’ont’ench’ŭ p’orŏm 문화콘텐츠 포럼). Nearly seventy people packed the seminar room, meaning that about one tenth of the Association’s 700 registered members were present to hear Kim Hyŏn’s strategies for bridg-ing the humanities and cultural contents studies. I attended this lecture in preparation for this article and spoke to as many attendees as I could to learn about their background and research interests. None of the people with whom I spoke had an academic position in a mainstream humanities field such as history, philosophy, or literature, though many had an advanced degree in one of those fields. In line with this pattern, two presenters and four discussants, who made up the two panels, did not have an affiliation with a department in the humanities, with the exception of two discussants: one was a professor of linguistics and another had a joint appointment between the departments of philosophy and cultural contents (Table 3).

On 22 August 2014, the Korean Historical Association (Yŏksa Hakhoe 역사학회), the Korean equivalent of the American Historical Association, held a day-long seminar themed: ‘On Combining Historical Studies and ict: The Future of Korean History’ (Yŏksahak kwa ict ŭi yunghap mosaek: Han’guk yŏksahak ŭi mirae t’amsaek 역사학과 ict 의 융합 모색 - 한국 역사학의 미래 탐색). None of the six presenters were historians. Among the five discus-sants, two were specialists of cultural contents, one was of unknown disciplin-ary background, and only two were historians. In line with this pattern, from 30 October to 1 November 2014, the Ministry of Education and unesco will jointly host the third ‘World Humanities Forum’ in Daejeon, exploring issues concerning ‘Humanities in the Era of Transformative Science and Technology.’10

10  http://www.worldhumanitiesforum.org/ (retrieved 29 October 2014).

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The absence of Korean historians, literary scholars, and philosophers in this high-profile forum is disconcerting.1112

table 3 The Inaugural Meeting of ‘Cultural Contents Forum’. Host: The Association for Humanities Contents Studies 3 July 2014 at Konkuk University

Session 1: The Digital Humanities: Definitions and Current Trends 디지털인문학의 개념과 현황

Presenter Kim Hyŏn Professor, Humanities Informatics, Academy of Korean Studies

PhD, Department of Philosophy, Korea University, 1992

Discussant Kim Sŏngdo Professor, Department of Linguistics, Korea University

PhD, Université Paris X Nanterre

Sin Kwangch’ŏl Professor, Department of Digital and Cultural Contents, Hanshin University

PhD, Department of Religious Studies, Seoul National University

Pak Ch’iwan Professor, Departments of Philosophy and Cultural Contents, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

PhD, Université de Bourgogne

Session 2: Strategies for Encouraging Collaborative Research in the Humanities12 인문학 산학협력 연계 방안

Yu Tonghwan Professor, Department of Cultural Contents, Konkuk University

PhD, Department of Philosophy, Korea University, 2000

Pak Kisu Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Contents, Hanyang University

PhD, Hanyang University, 2011

11  http://www.worldhumanitiesforum.org/?f=07_m1 (retrieved 29 October 2014).12  Contrary to the published schedule, Yu Tonghwan made a late change to his topic and

gave a presentation on data visualization in the humanities.

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Kim Hŭigyŏng Researcher, Department of Interaction Science, Sungkyunkwan University

PhD, Department of Global Contents, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

Pak Sŏngmi CEO, DK Media MA, Graduate School of Media, Sogang University

Conclusion

In an article published in 2001, Kim Hyŏn suggested that humanists take sci-ence and engineering seriously, just as undergraduate students in science and engineering have been required to enrol in courses in the humanities (Kim 2001/2012: 367). His urging was in vain. Many humanities departments in sec-ond-tier and provincial universities in South Korea have dealt with cutbacks or been converted into a career-oriented ‘contents’ department ‒ humanities contents, cultural contents, or historical contents. These measures reveal more than temporary consequences of a pro-business, conservative government’s neoliberal deregulation of academia. The spectre of ‘the crisis of humanities’ involves not the lack of funds ‒ as is the case in the United States ‒ but disre-gard for a major, ongoing. What are humanists to do? There needs to be a due recognition that the digital/humanities divide in South Korea is part of a long process that goes back to the beginnings of the ict-driven economic develop-ment in the 1980s and the humanists’ disengagement from this process. This story, along with that of South Korea’s abrupt growth into a major it power, needs detailed research.

Moreover, humanities programs in South Korea and overseas Korean studies should not let the government of South Korea unilaterally determine the defi-nition and direction of the digital turn in the humanities as a site for training students for the usd $2 trillion global cultural contents industry. Rather than pretend that digitization is not happening, humanists should present opin-ions, critiques, and original visions that speak to the present day. A trendy sub-ject like the Korean Wave needs to be situated and understood in the broader context of less fashionable topics such as economic growth after Fordism, the Asian financial crisis, and Korea’s transition into a knowledge economy. The contemporary impact of ict and technology-related R&D on Korean society

table 3 The Inaugural Meeting of ‘Cultural Contents Forum’. Host (cont.)

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should be discussed, especially the troubling sides of ict development that techno-optimists tend to overlook. For example, to what extent are disruptive technologies responsible for the highest suicide rate among oecd nations among the elderly poor? (Hankyoreh 2014) To address such an issue, human-ists in South Korea might want to adopt the future orientation of their seniors who launched internal development theory in the 1960s. Presentism and pre-diction tend to be objects of criticism after the postmodern turn, but a human-istic inquiry devoid of concerns for the present day and speculations about the future will fade into irrelevance.

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